Robert Bloomfield’s ‘Winter Song’: an Introduction, by Hugh Underhill

WINTER SONG

Dear Boy, throw that Icicle down,
And sweep this deep snow from the door:
Old Winter comes on with a frown;
A terrible frown for the poor.
In a Season so rude and forlorn,
How can age, how can infancy bear
The silent neglect and the scorn
Of those who have plenty to spare?

II.

Fresh broach’d is my Cask of old Ale,
Well-tim’d now the frost is set in;
Here’s Job come to tell us a tale,
We’ll make him at home to a pin.
While my Wife and I bask o’er the fire,
The roll of the Seasons will prove,
That Time may diminish desire,
But cannot extinguish true love.

III.

O the pleasures of neighbourly chat,
If you can but keep scandal away,
To learn what the world has been at,
And what the great Orators say;
Though the Wind through the crevices sing,
And Hail down the chimney rebound;
I’m happier than many a king
While the Bellows blow Bass to the sound.

IV.

Abundance was never my lot:
But out of the trifle that’s given,
That no curse may alight on my Cot,
I’ll distribute the bounty of Heaven;
The fool and the slave gather wealth:
But if I add nought to my store,
Yet while I keep conscience in health,
I’ve a Mine that will never grow poor.

The opening line of this ‘song’ may call to mind ‘When icicles hang by the wall / And Dick the shepherd blows his nail…’ and the two seasonal songs to which it belongs at the end of Love’s Labours Lost, but Bloomfield needed no prompting from Shakespeare. In the rural world he is remembering from his boyhood there would have been ready access to a store of ‘season’ songs and poems, a traditional popular ‘kind’ rooted in an agricultural way of life governed in all its aspects by the seasons. And Bloomfield at his uncle Austin’s farm might well have been such a boy being told, kindly, to get back to his task of snow-clearing instead of larking about (if this is what he is doing) with ‘that Icicle’. Versions of the anapaestic line he uses (compare his ‘Song, Sung by Mr. Bloomfield at the Anniversary of Doctor Jenner’s Birth-Day 1803’) are common in popular song and poetry (‘Come, lasses and lads, get leave of your dads…’). Smoothness is not a priority and iambs, inversions etc. might be mixed in, but the heavy-stressed rhythm, with the lines fixed in place by regular rhyme, is an obvious aid to memory. The poem testifies, then, to popular and oral traditions in a world, as we see at lines 17-20, where news was still carried by word of mouth. A range of traditional and commonplace topics, the ‘oft-expressed’ in learned as well as popular works, is touched on here: the sufferings of the poor in hard times, against which are set the unfeelingness of pomp and wealth (lines 4-8, 29-32); the duty of hospitality, which among the labouring classes seems more a spontaneous sharing of warmth and shelter and whatever one has in winter (lines 9-12, 25-8); the power of true affections to be proof against time (lines 13-16); modest comforts bringing a contentment often denied the great (lines 23-4). But as so often, whether in theme or choice of form, Bloomfield profits from traditions while bringing something distinctively his own to them. A commonplace like ‘Time may diminish desire, / But cannot extinguish true love’ doesn’t seem one here; it affects us, I think, as something directly felt. Such effects are achieved by the lived immediacy of setting and detail, the homely expressions, the freshness and ease of voice (Dear Boy…’). It’s also a matter of pitch, of something equable and unforced, a certain delicacy which wins our trust. The speaker doesn’t seem striving for profound reflections but saying straight out what he feels and values. The poem echoes much that Bloomfield affirms in The Farmer’s Boy and elsewhere, celebrating ‘natural affections’, the feelings and generous impulses on which community depends and which sustain domestic life. The quiet wit of his concluding play on notions of wealth and poverty suggests more. These lines might appear too ready to acquiesce in a given order and the acceptance of a mean lot (as might, for example, parts of May Day with the Muses). But attention to the precise thought of the lines and to the weight of ‘fool’ and ‘slave’ (perhaps also to a sub-text about the amassing of fortunes from mining enterprises while the poor languish), impresses us with Bloomfield’s fixed resolve in that holding to ‘conscience’ and in the reproof to those who pursue riches and refinement at the cost of humanity. He may have located such values in a lost world but they never lost their force for him.

Note: ‘at home to a pin’ (line 12). Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has:
In or to a merry pin; almost drunk: an allusion to a sort of tankard, formerly used in the north, having silver pegs or pins set at equal distances from the top to the bottom: by the rules of good fellowship, every person drinking out of one of these tankards, was to swallow the quantity contained between two pins; if he drank more or less, he was to continue drinking till he ended at a pin: by this means persons unaccustomed to measure their draughts were obliged to drink the whole tankard. Hence when a person was a little elevated with liquor, he was said to have drunk to a merry pin.